1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to driver circuits for driving transmission lines, and more particularly to complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) driver circuits.
2. Background
A dominant limitation of conventional manufactured driver circuits is their artificially low transmission rates due to widely varying operating conditions, such as voltage, temperature, and process variation. Due to varied operating conditions, the propagation delay and the output impedance of drivers varies widely, thus, hampering impedance matching.
Propagation delay can vary typically by a factor of two to three across two extreme operating conditions. This variation of propagation delay seriously impacts system timing at higher frequencies. Without a constant delay across all operating conditions, system timing is adversely impaired such that timing margins have to be introduced to handle any delay time variations due to varying operating conditions.
A most common and useful communication topology is peer-to-peer connections with full duplex transmission. To achieve optimal impedance matching in this type of topology, the output impedance of the transmitting side must match the characteristic impedance of the transmission line. Impedance matching at the transmitting end has traditionally been accomplished by placing a series resistor between the output driver and the transmission line. For this method to work, the output impedance of the output driver must be kept much lower than the characteristic impedance of the transmission line. This results in a much higher cost in area and power than required for merely transmitting a signal. Moreover, impedance matching is degraded due to varying resistance across operating conditions and the non-linearity of the driver. Another method is to use the nonlinear transistors of the output driver to approximate the linear characteristic impedance of the transmission line. This attempt, however, results in even worse impedance matching than a series resistor placed at the transmitting end.
FIG. 1 illustrates an I/O (input/output) driver 102 communicating with a receiver 104 via a transmission line 106. The transmission line 106 has a characteristic impedance Zo, and may be the physical layer of a bus. The driver 102 and the receiver 104 are complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. For purposes of mathematical analysis, the input impedance (Zin) of the receiver 104 is approximated as being infinite relative to other impedances in the circuit. The receiver 104 may be one or more CMOS logic gates, or a differential amplifier.
The driver 102 is transmitting an electromagnetic wave travelling in the transmit direction 108. If Zin of the receiver 104 is not equal to Zo, then a reflected wave will propagate in the receiver direction 110. If the impedance of the driver 102 is not matched to the characteristic impedance Zo then another reflected wave will again be generated, but now travelling in the transmit direction 108. There will be many multiple reflections, and the electric and magnetic field vectors at any point along the transmission line 106 is the vector sum (superposition) of the transmitted field vector and all reflected field vectors at that point. This superposition of the transmitted wave and the reflected waves may cause signal degradation, which typically limits, for longer transmission lines, the speed at which digital data is reliably transmitted from the driver 102 to the receiver 104.
The first reflected wave can be reduced by terminating the receiving end of the transmission line 106 with a receiver or stub having an impedance matched to Zo. This may, however, require the use of an off-chip resistor, and furthermore, power may be wasted due to ohmic losses in the resistor. Another negative impact of impedance matching at the receiver end is loss of amplitude, potentially halving the amplitude, which can then make the transmitting signal susceptible to noise.